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120942-biggest-problem-im-seeing-with-wildstar
Content ---- The problem is that there ARE lower level people playing. However, almost all are specced for DPS, so they stack the queue full of people who can't run together. And then there are people like me. I play a lot of alts, but I never queue. I can put together a premade from guildies, friends, and allies, so I avoid PUGs. Maybe with the glory currency, it will become more common for people to run PUGs. However, I doubt it's the lack of the leveling population. There are a lot of people who simply don't have any inclination to queue. | |} ---- ---- What level are you and what did you queue for? Also I believe queues are known to bug from time to time. Not that this invalidates any of the above, just mentioning it. | |} ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- There's not enough levelling population that queues for lowbie PvP to pop. If you meant PvE instances, it's more efficient to just stick to world and region story missions that are above your level. At level if you have to. | |} ---- ---- It wouldn't matter if it took months/years to get to max level, those starting now would still see ghost towns in the lower zones, since those who started at launch would still be ahead of them. Certainly, we would see more of a population grouping at the mid-to-high end zones, but that would do little for the population at the low end. Sure, if they removed brackets from PVP you would see more sub 50 queues popping with a slower leveling time (assuming PVP XP gain is balanced), but even max level PVP can have long queue times. The reason for dead low end zones/queues regardless of leveling speed is a very small influx of new/returning players. Alts are a wash, since with a slower leveling speed a greater percentage would still be in the lower levels, but there would be fewer alts to begin with as people would still be leveling or maximizing their main. | |} ---- FFXIV is one of the easiest games to level in I've ever played and yet its low-level content is always bustling because the game actually encourages max level characters to run it. WS could learn from that. >_< | |} ---- Could also learn from that what a real quarterly drop looks like. Game is just barely twice as old is this one and their 4 previously quarterly drops had more content (as in new content, ie dungeons, raids, main story quests, etc) in 1 of their quarterly drops then this game has had in all of their drops combined. Don't believe me? Lets look at drop 5 for FFXIV for the preview put out today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pj3hGDaDZqI Every one of their drops has had content on this scale. Google or wiki it. | |} ---- If we wanted a tab target stand still combat wizard and warriors mmo none of us would be here. What SE does with there game has nothing to do with wildstar so i fail to see what youre trying to show. That game has been in development for 6 years and had a major major overhaul. They have pieces from the old game they can revamp into new content. As for the OP I think the new system will help but not a crazy amount. But with the new protostar solo dungeon you should at least be dungeon ready by the time you hit cap and get to run them at will. As other have said join a guild. Its a rare night that I dont do a dungeon or adventure with my guildies and im a lvl 45 dps :) | |} ---- They really don't. I think it is a fair comparison, though. Just because XIV has a different combat system doesn't mean that other systems in that game aren't relatable to what we have in WildStar. They have dungeons; we have dungeons. They have story; we have story. They have daily zones; we have daily zones. A lot of the structure is almost identical; the differences lie in design choices in how to implement them. And it is always worthwhile looking at one's competitors and seeing what they are doing well. | |} ---- ---- ---- Since when? I needed months to get my WHM to max level and simply clear the story line. | |} ---- ---- Stand still combat? Troll much? I dare you to raid or do boss even in HM dungeons in FFXIV standing still for more than 10 seconds in the same place and expect to live. I've raided in Wildstar, and while the action combat with telegraphs is the best one I have found to date in my opinion it doesn't take away from the skill needed to raid in FFXIV. I'm comparing the devs in that game putting out new dungeons with every drop, new story content with lots of new quests with every drop, new raids with nearly every drop. And the revamped game has only been out a year. It's apple to apple comparison because I am spending the same 15 bucks hoping the devs from both games give me new quality content every quarter. I feel I get that 15 bucks worth in FFXIV, I don't feel I get a quarter of my subs worth in WS and I have active accounts in both games. | |} ---- Much as I love this game, I refuse to dance around glaring problems like this. It's no accident that people now use /lfg to find groups. LFG Chat is not a default channel - the player community created and uses it as a workaround to this problem and its ubiquity is proof of the OP's assertion. Ironically enough, it's also why it's much easier to find World Event groups like Scorchwing and Lightspire than it is to join a PuG for, say, Normal STL or Skullcano. So you're prolly thinking, "okay, smartass, what's your big solution to all this?" Three immediately come to mind: 1: Global LFG Chat as default. Newbies shouldn't level to 50 and then realize that there's a channel to get people to help them with group quests. 2: Improved queues. Make group queues like WoW where you can actually see your party assemble and not be stuck in limbo until all 5 members are available. Then make this feature available for all the quests in your tracker. 3: Zone Summon to party. Ever wonder why Scientists are so popular? Simply make it so that the Group Leader can summon other party members in the same zone to him. 1m CD. If you wanna get fancy, use the Drop Pod animation for players zoning in. Oh, and make Shiphand and Adventure Quest Trackers like Dungeons where they minimize all other quests. Please. | |} ---- No, they should add more leveling content and slow leveling down, why does everyone want rush to max level? | |} ---- ---- because in a game with no incentive to go back to previous zones, and no level scaling, the content gets abandoned. add to that poor design when it comes down to alt characters, the bulk of your players (the peak on the graph chart) doesn't hang around all this content so it basically goes to waste. it gets played 1 time per player and then forgotten. if you had level scaling, and stuff to "farm" in these zones, or daily quests, or more account bound things so that players would create alts, or whatever even smarter reason to go back to the zones i would say: go, add more content. wildstar doesn't have enough players to make low level dungeons and pvp queues pop. no point in "adding low level content". thats why Sno White. think about the big picture and try to tell me why they should add low level content. | |} ---- you can do your "daily zones" as a single player.. you'll even have veteran shiphand to solo around in now. but in any case: as a single player, you will arrive at endgame and pug the dungeon and happen to be in a group with 2 or 3 maxed out players that will faceroll everything because of continuous gear power creep (better gear gets added all the time, eventually trivializing all the other content for these players that have it. a relic of dated design philosophy copied from older games which wildstar have a lot... so do not worry. they will carry you. | |} ---- Actually, if that's the way the queue system is designed, then the problem is in the queue system and will never go away until the queue system is sensible. Every person who enters a dungeon can fill more than one role. Every team that has someone who CAN heal has a team with a healer on it. They may not be specced for it. They may not have experience with it. But if they get in there and discover they don't have enough healing active, they can do what any of us would do in that situation: they can adapt and switch to it. *facepalm* No wonder the queues aren't popping. The game has decided you're too dumb to say "Hey, maybe one of the three of us on the team that can heal, should." | |} ---- It's not just that. How many people do you know that maintain a set of support gear? You can't queue to heal or tank if you do nothing but stack AP while you quest. It's not the game that decided to say that. This was also an issue way back in the day in WoW, where you couldn't get a healer or tank and generally had to make do while you were leveling with people in DPS gear. Only in this game, people don't have an LFG channel to work that out, they've only got the LFG queue mechanic. So you've got endless streams of people queued for DPS and nobody queueing for heals or tanking because they don't even think about it. It's more related to questing being a faster and more efficient way of leveling even if the queues are popping off the hook, so why build a support set when you can just quest and level faster (and with more interesting scenery)? Carbine's retuning experience and gear gains at low levels of content to encourage people, but you can't PUG if there's nobody interested in tanking or healing. | |} ---- You have to actively select which roles you're willing to fill. What the game doesn't give you is any sense of what the role populations are. Some people actively refuse to do anything other than their role. I'll never inflict my tanking on a random instance group because I have no experience with it. Worse, I haven't memorized the instances so I'd have no idea what to do and tanks are expected to lead the group. | |} ---- I agree that it's a gear issue. While leveling, unless you had a specific plan to be a healer or tank with a group of buddies, you just don't acquire the gear while leveling. When you get a quest reward you are pushed into DPS options, otherwise you'll find that you can't reliably do the quests and advance yourself in level. Without access to all crafting professions, I doubt I would have had the ability to even have a level appropriate set of support gear on my alts. I know I didn't have any support gear on my main until well after I was level 50, and reflecting back on the challenges my leveling group had with content, support gear is probably a huge contributor to the struggles we had learning STL when we could try it for the first time, as well as WotW when we got to it for the first time. Not sure if anyone else experienced it, but when we got to WotW we literally couldn't get through it for many attempts until we switched to a healer who had support gear and we cleared it without a struggle at all. I'm not suggesting that the instances weren't fun at those levels, just thinking about the challenges faced when there for the first time and what contributed to those challenges. In this case specifically support gear. | |} ---- ---- ---- Okay, put your big boy pants on, you don't have to get your valley-girl on every time someone suggests that the problem might be related to players not queueing for the skill positions. PUGs work, especially on normals. As I said, the reason people don't queue as support roles is because people don't quest in support roles, so they aren't constantly maintaining a set for support power. As Khavaltre noted, if you don't have your support power stat, ALL your support abilities are running with stock numbers. It used to be, in WoW, you'd have to work hard to get a dungeon group together. People did the same thing. The LFG queues can be the same, depending on your server, you could still face stiff waiting times as a DPS. They even went the extra distance and started rewarding people for queueing in the "most needed role" if there was a huge deficiency, which essentially means you get extra loot for tanking. The major game reason (eschewing that PUGs aren't all about slogging through, it just takes one person to quit after one death in a rage to completely halt the group) that queues are so much more barren even as a proportion of population in Wildstar has nothing to do with mastering team dynamics. It has to do with, as I said, questing being more efficient. In WoW, you can just run a train on dungeons for hours and level up faster than if you were just questing. That leads to people actually leveling up as tanks and healers, rather than just sitting in a queue as DPS. In Wildstar, the big issue they can address (and are addressing) is that even if the queues are popping, leveling through dungeons is still the same speed or slower than questing. What they need are people who level and gearly purely through and for instanced content. It's the only way to definitively get some movement in the system. Right now, in terms of renown and experience, it's just not "worth it" to PUG as a support role when you can just quest to 50. That, Carbine is fixing. What they can't fix is that there will always be a disproportionate amount of DPS in queue that will always have significantly longer queue times than their support role counterparts. That's not something Carbine can fix; you can't make someone heal or tank that doesn't want to do it. That's why queueing as a damage dealer in every game leads to longer queue times. I have to think people queueing as DPS in this system aren't actually surprised that the queue for them is long and have no idea why, I surmise that they're aware but also would rather simply ride out questing than gear and build for tanking or healing. The only hope is that Carbine can maybe get enough dedicated support players to bring the disparity down organically by making it worth it to ride as support. That's where the increases to XP gains and multiple-dungeon-and-adventure-queueing is coming from, people months ago when the queues were empty even when the game was packed bringing up that they needed to make it worth it to level via dungeons. That's all Carbine can really hope to do. They can introduce all kinds of systems, but they're starting with the ones most likely to have an effect. Make it faster to level as a tank or healer in instances, and not everyone will queue as a DPS. That's the hope, anyway, because a lot of it rides on some of the playerbase actually taking up the flag for support. If the entire game's population just queues DPS while they're questing, it will never pop no matter what Carbine does. | |} ---- Thank you for that respectful and constructive contribution to the thread. May I suggest that a level 20 dungeon that people may be experiencing in their first day of MMORPG play ever is really not an appropriate place to ask people to put their big boy pants on? Or is that just me getting totally valley girl on you? Blame the players it is, got it. Carry on. | |} ---- If you get to STL on your first day of play, odds are you will do fine. And actually, I do think that throwing pronounced sighs through soliloquies to be somewhat small and childish. Your personal peception may vary. If you didn't think my feedback was very constructive, I would be perfectly happy to type an instructive guide on how to write feedback that does not sound like you're not writing a blog about your parents not taking you to the mall If saying that someone's going to have to tank and heal for the queue to pop is blaming it on the players, then yes, I have just blamed the players. I can only hope the players' feelings aren't hurt by that painful assertion. If the players feel like complaining at their treatment, they may direct their anger to my P.R. department. I thought the idea that a PUG won't pop without a tank and healer to be a pretty straightforward observation, but if that's a personal slight, I can only hope the players' egos aren't bruised by my spite. Woe be to "the players". | |} ---- ---- Or just scaling the experience as a percentage of the XP bar in instances like adventures and dungeons. That way, STL and KV scaled with level. | |} ---- ---- Instructive guide on how to write feedback? Lawl, here we go again mister high and mighty. Who made you president on the proper way to type in a forum? Problem isn't the players or even how they queue, it is the lack of players even available to queue. That comes down to Carbine making a game more people think is worth playing. Not going so well at the moment. Best of luck with that, and trying to be forum king. | |} ---- You are under the impression that people are complaining about something nobody is using? That would make this a somewhat pointless conversation, if nobody is queueing. Or are you under the impression that there are no more than five people trying to PUG at any given time? | |} ---- Wow, talk about dense. You might just make it to being the second person on my forum ignore list, right behind Lethality. | |} ---- ---- No, not dense at all. The reason I bring this up is following the given logic: -You make the assumption no one is around to queue. Not that people are not queueing, but that nobody is even available to queue. -A queue works thus. People individually or in small groups click to queue. The system logs them into a list and waits for the first three DPS, tank, and healer, then spools them an instance. That means that, even if there are only five people queueing, the queue will always pop as long as the proportion is correct. -If we take that a queue works thus, and your assumption is taken as read, then the logical conclusion is that PUGs are not worth the time to fix because nobody is going to be available to use them. That's a very different argument than what we're hearing, that people are always queueing but the queue never pops for them. It assumes that the people are not even there. So that's not me being dense, that's me asking if your intention is to have them leave improvments to the LFG system behind because they are literally worthless. | |} ---- Like I said, dense. Your assumption on what I am assuming is hilarious at best. My statement was simply a mockery that a dead game with as few people left playing at low level as there is now is hardly, if ever, going to pop a level 20 queue. This is because the number of people queuing is low in general and the trinity by nature always has less tanks and healers then dps (as you and others noted previously in this thread). SlyJeff's post above yours proves the point that even with a tank and healer going into STL queue it should have been instant queue if people are queuing for it. So the combo of too few people available, and too few tanks and healers = almost no STL level 20 queues ever popping. Clear enough for you? | |} ---- ---- How is the assumption about the game hilarious? Was there something in my logic that you found to be inaccurate? Was there a reason that you felt that the assumption that you think that improving the PUG system would be ineffectual based on your stated premise that there are not enough people to queue in the first place was misplaced? If there are no players queueing, do you feel that the people complaining here about the lack of queues popping are not actually queueing in PUGs and sitting in them long enough (as Slyjeff suggested)? Do you feel that Slyjeff's evidence then makes sure that what you say is a mockery (which you then assert has evidence now) is actually factual? It doesn't change the question that I asked. If you assert the game is dead and has no one playing at low level, then no improvements to the PUG system will actually improve the queue. To say that, therefore, you are inferring that any improvements on queueing will be worthless because no one is even there seems very logical. If it is not, please explain why you feel that way. If not, I don't think it's beyond reason to read that you feel all the talk of improving rewards for queueing randomly are wasteful if you don't believe anyone is available to queue, rather than that people are available but not queueing. I look forward to hearing your analysis. Show them how it's done, Ty. :D | |} ---- ---- Nail. Head. Well said. Process improvement's a la FFXIV would be a nice start. A daily roulette of some sort that gave people incentive at 50 to queue for low level dungeons would improve queue times dramatically, even in Deadstar. FFXIV also uses "party finder" which is essentially the bulletin board system asked for above where people can create their own groups people can join from anywhere in the world with a tag describing what the group was created for. | |} ---- This is true all the way through the queue system. When I queue as tank and my wife as healer, though both of us would prefer DPS roles due to having played support roles extensively over the many years we've been MMOing, we get instant queue pops almost every time and pretty damned fast pops otherwise. I'm geared up enough to tank GA if I wanted to but it's simply not my preference to do so. I'll tank dungeons primarily for guildees who need the job done, but I don't think I ever queued as a tank for a PUG. Why? Because there's always some jerk waiting to criticize how you play. He shuts up when you blast him off the chart in DPS, but won't if you're a healer or a tank. You're always to blame for his death no matter how poorly he's playing. | |} ---- That is worrisome, yeah. | |} ---- Interesting, because my experience tanking for pugs (veteran dungeons) is that I don't think I've ever been criticized, and there's plenty to criticize :) The one time I can remember dealing with a jerk DPS was for a level 20 STL PUG when I was still leveling up, and there was a DPS complaining that I was taking too long to pull (because I was explaining fights for a player who had never been in the dungeon before). When he pulled the first boss to push me a long, I just logged off mid fight. Mostly, if people are jerks to me while I'm tanking, I feel like I have the option to stop any time I'm not having fun. Well, feel that way when I DPS too- mostly because I don't need anything from dungeons and just do them for fun anyway. | |} ---- ---- ---- ---- ----